If you aren’t familiar with, or a fan of, the British sitcom Peep Show, then this won’t strike you as a particularly sunny or uplifting track, and with lines like ‘Paranoia, paranoia, everybody’s coming to...

How anyone can spin a ball the width of Gatting boggles the mind

Really, what’s not to like? Cute animals and a laid back holiday vibe. True, if you peer at the surface for long enough (not all that long actually) you’ll see through the veneer of blissful...

It’s really hard to find novels about the music industry that aren’t entirely populated by sleazy scumbags you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemies. Disconcertingly, the more you read about the reality of the industry,...

Summer is an awesome time. Unless you’re painfully introverted, in which case it can be hell, only hotter. Stay indoors and revel in the sunshine and happiness from the comfort of your own headphones.

Set aside some time for this one - you’ll need it, but it’s well worth the effort.

Before the highly and diversely talented Björk embarked on her solo career, all kooky screams and smiles, she was, of course, lead singer of Icelandic band The Sugarcubes, doing pretty much the same thing, only...

In 2001, M83 were a vaguely shoegazey dreamsynth French outfit releasing a debut self-titled album. By 2011, they’d transformed into an epic double album releasing group, capable of unleashing a cathedral of electronic sound.

Apart from the vocals, everything you hear is sampled.

File under “not so easy to google”, along with !!!. -M- (his more retrievable given name is Matthieu Chedid) hails from a musical French family, and created his on-stage persona to combat his natural shyness....

The trouble with producing inoffensive melodic indie pop is that there’s already so much of it to go around; new songs sometimes make only a tiny splash in the melodic indie pop pond, and the...

Something German, I feel, in honour of this evening’s Champions League final. Also, something for the Giro, and coming Tour. And really, something beautiful and entrancing, and comfortably the greatest 30 year old electronic track...

Sometimes I am a google ninja, finding the facts that you can’t. Other times I am just a dumb guy who likes a TV theme tune but doesn’t even think to look it up, which...

The sound of summer, as channelled through the creative hive-mind of a bunch of Barcelona-based Basques. I highly recommend you listen to the Stay Close remixes and 2010’s Ayrton Senna EP, the first three seconds...

Loathe as I am to post video-less tracks, I can make exceptions for the perhaps lesser knowns, such as this track by the bespectacled half of Kings of Convenience. The Black Keys Work appears on...

I’d love to be the guy that develops concepts for music videos: it’s pretty much a free-for-all, anything goes kind of frontier world. Take this effort from all-the-rage French popsters Phoenix, for instance. While I’m...

Staring across at Efterklang from the other end of the Danish pop spectrum, Junior Senior would be an entertaining choice, but only if they can recreate the magic formula that led to Move Your Feet....

And so congratulations go to Denmark, for winning with a song that was a bafflingly strong favourite, but for which I can’t recall the tune for love nor money. Euphoria, on the other hand…

Not merely one of the best songs written with Eurovision in mind, but one of the best songs ever written, and the kind of song that requires only the thinnest of excuses to post. My...

Norway aren’t really as Eurovision-tragic as they’re made out to be. Yes, they have failed to score more times than any other nation, and yes they’ve finished last more times than anyone else, but against...